The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

The co-op

I didn’t hear about the co-op until afterward. Orv told me some of it, and Scott told me the rest.

That Thursday, Orv drove his old Ford out to the co-op elevator west of town.

Scott had been holding his beans in the bin, waiting on the price, and he was out there that morning asking about selling them after the first of the year.

Orv parked beside Scott’s pickup and waited for him to come out of the office. It was cold and blowing.

Orv stood by his truck with his hands in his coat pockets until Scott saw him.

“Morning, Orv,” Scott said.

“Scott,” Orv said. “I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer, because I’m too old for the other kind.”

“Why is your ex-wife paying for your tractor?” Orv asked. “Five hundred dollars every first Sunday, at Elmer’s table. Ten months now. I watched her do it.”

Scott said he stood there in the wind and couldn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, “I didn’t know she was paying him at the cafe.”

“Does that make it better or worse?” Orv asked him.

“Worse,” Scott said. He said it was the only true thing he’d said out loud about the divorce all year.

Orv nodded. “Elmer Dahl taught you to farm,” he said. “I watched him do it. I watched you on that bike every morning at five. He never once said a word against you, not in all this time. You think about that.”

Then Orv got back in his truck and drove home. That was the whole conversation.

Orv told me later it took about three minutes, and that it was one of the harder things he had done in a while.

“I like the boy,” Orv said, when I asked him why he went. “That’s why I went.”

The first Sunday in January

January came in hard. Twelve below on New Year’s morning, and the county roads drifted shut twice that week.

On the first Sunday of the month I put envelope number eleven in my coat pocket and walked down the stairs from my rooms and across the street to the cafe.

The snow squeaked under my boots the way it does when it’s really cold.

Dad was already there. So were Orv and Leon and Pete. Deb had the coffee going and the pie case full, and the snow bright against the big front windows.

The bell over the cafe door rang, and a gust of cold came in across the floor.

Scott walked in.

He was in his church clothes, which meant he had gone to the early service for the first time since summer.

He stood inside the door and stamped his boots on the mat for longer than he needed to. Then he took his cap off and held it in one hand.

The cafe got quiet in pieces. First the tables near the door, then the counter, then the booths along the wall. People in a small town can feel it when something is about to happen.

He didn’t sit down. He came straight across the room to our table and stopped beside my father’s chair.

He had a white envelope in his hand. A thick one, thicker than any of mine had ever been.

Dad looked up at him and waited. He didn’t say hello and he didn’t say anything else. He just waited, the way he used to wait on a heifer to calve, patient and watchful.

Scott looked at me first. Then he looked at Dad, and I watched him make himself do it.

He looked my father right in the eye, the way Dad had taught him to when he was fourteen years old.

“Elmer,” he said. His voice was rough. “I owe you an apology, and I owe one to Nicole, and I owe the truth to everybody who heard what I said this year.”

He said it loud enough for the whole cafe to hear.

“Nicole didn’t walk out on me,” Scott said. “I asked for the divorce. I filed. She moved out because the house was on my family’s ground. I told people she left because it was easier than saying I couldn’t hold it together.”

Nobody moved. Deb stood by the coffee machine with the pot in her hand and didn’t pour a thing.

“And the tractor’s mine,” he said. “The loan’s mine. I let her take it in the decree because I couldn’t stand to come to you and say I’d fallen behind. I told myself I’d pay you back someday. Someday kept getting further off.”

He set the envelope down on the table in front of my father, right next to his cup.

“I sold a load of beans Friday,” he said. “I held them past New Year’s for the taxes. That’s fifty-five hundred dollars. That’s half. That’s my half. I should pay all of it, and I will if Nicole will let me, but I wanted to bring this today, in front of everybody, so they’d know.”